Jr.

Jackson, Maynard Holbrook, Jr., 1938-2003, American politician, b. Dallas, Tex., grad. Morehouse College (B.A., 1956), North Carolina Central Univ. (J.D., 1964). Jackson, a Democratic lawyer with a confidently confrontational style, entered politics in 1968 with a strong but unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate. Elected vice mayor of Atlanta in 1969, he won the mayoralty in 1973, becoming the first African-American mayor of a major Southern city. Serving three terms (1974-82, 1990-94), he established landmark affirmative-action programs and gave African Americans a greatly enlarged role in Atlanta's political and economic life.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 1950-, American scholar and critic, b. Keyser, W.Va., grad. Yale (B.A. 1973), Cambridge (Ph.D. 1979), where he studied with Wole Soyinka. Gates is an expert on African-American literature and culture. His rediscovery and reinterpretation of historic black literature began in 1981 with his finding, authenticating, and publishing of the first known novel by an African American, Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859). Since then Gates has been instrumental in bringing other previously lost works to light. His many books of criticism include Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), in which he develops the notion of "signifyin(g)," a linguistic tradition running throughout black culture that describes things or people by the use of humor, paradox, indirection, boast, and insult. His nonacademic works include Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997); he is also coeditor of The Dictionary of Global Culture (1997) and The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (2006). In 1999 he wrote and hosted a public television series on Africa and wrote a companion text, Wonders of the African World. Gates has taught at several universities, including Yale (1979-85), Cornell (1985-90), and Harvard (1991-).

Brownell, Herbert, Jr., 1904-96, U.S. attorney general (1953-57), b. Peru, Nebr. A lawyer in private practice in New York City (1927-53, 1957-89), he became active in the Republican party and served (1933-37) in the state legislature. He managed Thomas E. Dewey's successful campaign for the New York governorship (1942) as well as Dewey's unsuccessful presidential bids (1944, 1948). From 1944 to 1946 he chaired the Republican National Committee. A key supporter of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential campaign, Bownell was named attorney general and functioned as a close adviser to the president. Brownell was central in the nomination of Earl Warren as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as in the appointment of federal judges who advanced racial integration in the South. Although his anticommunism pleased some conservatives, Southerners in Congress were angered by his support for African-American civil rights, and in 1957 he resigned, returning to his New York practice.

Buckley, William Frank, Jr., 1925-2008, American editor, author, and lecturer, b. New York City, grad. Yale, 1946. A popular, eloquent, and witty spokesman for the conservative point of view, Buckley helped found the modern conservative movement and played an important part in promoting the growth of American conservatism during the second half of the 20th century. He first came to national attention with the publication of his book God and Man at Yale (1951), a scathing attack on his alma mater for what he alleged were its secular outlook and left-wing political bias. An editor for The American Mercury (1951-52), he founded (1955) the National Review, which soon became the leading journal of conservativism in the United States; he edited the magazine until 1990 and had a controlling interest in it until 2004. In 1965 he was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of New York City, a campaign he described in The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966). He hosted (1966-99) the Emmy-winning public-affairs television show "Firing Line," and wrote (1962-2008) a syndicated column, "On the Right." He wrote more than 50 books, both fiction and nonfiction. His novelistic accounts of the adventures of an American spy during the cold war include Saving the Queen (1976), Marco Polo, If You Can (1982), A Very Private Plot (1994), and Last Call for Blackford Oakes (2005). He also wrote The Redhunter (1999), a largely favorable fictional presentation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's activities.

Taylor, Joseph Hooton, Jr., 1941-, American astrophysicist, b. Philadelphia, Ph.D. Harvard, 1968. Taylor was a professor at the Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1969 to 1980, when he joined the faculty of Princeton. He retired from Princeton with emeritus status in 2006. Taylor shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics with Russell Hulse for their discovery in 1974 of the binary pulsar, a system consisting of a rapidly spinning neutron star and a nearby companion object of similar mass and diameter. Their finding and subsequent studies of this new type of pulsar verified the theory of general relativity for a system outside our solar system.

Pincay, Laffit Alejandro, Jr., 1946-, Panamanian jockey, b. Panama City. He began racing in Panama and came to the United States in 1965. Known as a strong finisher, Pincay was one of the top all-time money-winning jockeys and was inducted into racing's hall of fame at the age of 28, becoming the youngest rider to be so honored. In 1999 he broke Bill Shoemaker's record for career wins. Pincay won the Kentucky Derby once and the Belmont three times; he retired in 2003.

Hiller, Stanley, Jr., 1924-2006, American aeronautical engineer and business executive, b. San Francisco. At 12 years old, he designed and produced gas-propelled toy cars, a business that led to the formation of his first company, Hiller Industries. The fledgling aviation industry subsequently caught his fancy, particularly the accomplishments of Igor Sikorsky with helicopters, and by the time he was 17 he was convinced that the twin-rotor helicopter configuration was safer and more efficient than the single-rotor one. Forming the Hiller Aircraft Company, Hiller developed the unique XH-44, or Hiller Copter, with twin coaxial counter-rotating rotors, in 1944. Renamed Hiller Helicopter in 1948, the company was involved in the development of a number of prototype helicopters, but none achieved commercial success. Hiller also was a business turnaround specialist and helped restructure more than 30 companies during his career.

Hitchcock, Thomas, Jr., 1900-1944, American polo player and aviator, b. Aiken, S.C. The son of avid polo players, Tommy Hitchcock played in his first tournament at the age of 13. Hitchcock's polo playing in 1921 won for the United States the International Polo Challenge Cup, and later he excelled in several international tournaments. One of the most outstanding polo players of all time, Hitchcock received from the U.S. Polo Association the highest ranking, the 10-goal handicap, from 1922 until 1940. In World War II, Hitchcock was killed in an airplane crash in England while commanding a U.S. fighter-plane group.

Dies, Martin, Jr., 1901-72, American political leader, b. Colorado, Tex. A lawyer, he represented Texas as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1931-45; 1951-59). He urged Congress to create what became the House Un-American Activities Committee and was its first chairman. The committee was notorious for its exposés of alleged Communist infiltration into U.S. business and government. Dies wrote The Trojan Horse of America (1940).

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Memorial Parkway, Wyo.: see National Parks and Monuments (table).

Griffey, Ken, Jr. (George Kenneth Griffey, Jr.), 1969-, American baseball player, b. Donora, Pa. The son of a veteran outfielder, he joined the Seattle Mariners of the American League in 1989, played with the National League's Cincinnati Reds beginning in 2000, and returned to Seattle in 2009. In 1990 "Junior" and his father, Ken Griffey, Sr., 1950-, appeared in the same outfield, an event unique in major league history. The younger Griffey has been called the best all-around player of the 1990s. He led the American League in home runs in 1994 and 1997-99, hitting 56 homers in 1997 and 1998, and hit his 600th in 2008.

Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 1891-1967, American cabinet officer, b. New York City; son of Henry Morgenthau. He became interested in agriculture and bought a farm in Dutchess co., N.Y., where he became an intimate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1922, Morgenthau purchased the American Agriculturalist, a leading Eastern farm journal. After Roosevelt's election (1928) as governor of New York, he appointed Morgenthau chairman of the state agricultural advisory committee and later made him state conservation commissioner. When Roosevelt became President in 1933, he appointed Morgenthau chairman of the Federal Farm Board and governor of the Farm Credit Administration. Upon the illness of William H. Woodin, Morgenthau was named (Nov., 1933) Undersecretary of the Treasury. As Secretary of the Treasury (1934-45), he administered federal tax programs that raised unprecedented revenues, supervised the sale of over $200 billion worth of government bonds to finance America's defense and war activities, and advocated international monetary stabilization. Toward the end of World War II, Morgenthau outlined his plan for controlling Germany by converting it from an industrial to an agricultural economy. The plan was briefly considered but never put into operation. Morgenthau was influential in formulating postwar economic policy at the Bretton Woods Conference, which set up the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). After resigning as Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau became involved in philanthropic activities.

Alito, Samuel Anthony, Jr., 1950-, U.S. government official and judge, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (2006-), b. Trenton, N.J., grad. Princeton (A.B., 1972), Yale Law School (J.D., 1975). In 1977 he became an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey, and he subsequently served in the Reagan and G. H. W. Bush administrations as assistant to the U.S. solicitor general (1981-85), deputy assistant U.S. attorney general (1985-87), and U.S. attorney for New Jersey (1987-90). He was appointed in 1990 to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, where his opinions were solidly but thoughtfully conservative and generally respectful of precedent. Alito was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005 by President George W. Bush.

Lamb, Willis Eugene, Jr., 1913-2008, American physicist, b. Los Angeles, Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1938. Lamb was a professor at Columbia (1938-51), Stanford (1951-56), Oxford (1956-62), Yale (1962-74), and the Univ. of Arizona (1974-2008). He shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics with Polykarp Kusch for his discovery of a phenomenon called the Lamb shift, a small but measurable difference in electron energy levels within the hydrogen atom from what had been predicted theoretically by Paul Dirac. The discovery led physicists to reexamine the basic concepts behind applying quantum theory to electromagnetism, and became a foundation of quantum electrodynamics, a key piece of modern elementary particle physics.

Adams, Robert McCormick, Jr., 1926-, American anthropologist, b. Chicago, Ill., grad. Univ. of Chicago (Ph.B., 1947; M.A., 1952; Ph.D., 1956). He served on the faculty of the Univ. of Chicago (1955-84) and was director of the Oriental Institute there (1962-68). From 1984-1994 he was secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. He has done regionally oriented archaeological studies in Iraq, emphasizing the analysis of settlement patterns, and written extensively on the role played by irrigation, warfare, and ecological diversity in the evolution of the earliest states. His writings include Land Behind Baghdad (1965), The Evolution of Urban Society (1966), The Uruk Countryside (1972; with H. J. Nissen), Heartland of Cities (1981), and Paths of Fire (1996).

Ford, William Clay, Jr.: see Bill Ford under Ford, Henry.

Nash, John Forbes, Jr., 1928-, American mathematician, b. Bluefield, W.Va., grad. Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon Univ., B.A. and M.A. 1948), Ph.D. Princeton 1950. During a five-year period, beginning with his doctoral thesis in 1949, he established the mathematical principles of modern game theory (see games, theory of). In four papers published between 1950-53 he made seminal contributions to both non-cooperative game theory and to bargaining theory. He began to experience what he termed "mental disturbances" in 1959 and remained in seclusion for the next 30 years, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which he blamed on the mental effort expended in resolving contradictions in quantum theory. Nash returned to his academic research once the disease was in remission, and for his landmark work on the mathematics of game theory he shared the 1994 Nobel memorial economics prize with Hungarian-American economist John Harsanyi and German mathematician Reinhard Selten. Nash wrote Essays on Game Theory (1997).

Patton, George Smith, Jr., 1885-1945, American general, b. San Gabriel, Calif. A graduate of West Point (1909), he served in World War I and was wounded while commanding a tank brigade in France. Subsequently he served in the cavalry and the tank corps. In World War II he commanded (1942-43) a corps in North Africa and the 7th Army in Sicily. Despite a brilliant record, a much-publicized incident (Patton slapped a soldier suffering from battle fatigue) cost him his command and delayed until Aug., 1944, promotion to the permanent rank of major general. Early in 1944 he was given command of the 3d Army, which spearheaded the spectacular sweep of U.S. forces from Normandy through Brittany and N France, relieved Bastogne in Dec., 1944 (see Battle of the Bulge), crossed the Rhine (Mar., 1945), and raced across S Germany into Czechoslovakia. As military governor of Bavaria, he was criticized for leniency to Nazis and was removed (Oct., 1945) to take charge of the U.S. 15th Army. Patton was fatally injured in an automobile accident in Germany.

Paulson, Henry Merritt, Jr., 1946-, U.S. investment banker and government official, b. Palm Beach, Fla., grad. Harvard (M.B.A., 1970). After working as an assistant to the comptroller at the Pentagon (1970-72) and in the White House (1972-73), he joined (1974) the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs, rising to co-head of investment banking (1990), president and chief operating officer (1994), and chairman and chief executive officer (1999). An advocate of government balanced budgets, Paulson was appointed secretary of the treasury (2006-9) by President George W. Bush. In the credit crisis that began in 2007, Paulson, along with Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, played a central role in the government's efforts to limit its economic effects and prevent a major recession. Paulson is also an avid conservationist and served (2004-6) as board chairman for the Nature Conservancy.

Holder, Eric Himpton, Jr., 1951-, U.S. lawyer and government official, b. Queens, N.Y., grad. Columbia (B.A. 1973, J.D. 1976). He was a trial attorney with the U.S. Justice Dept. from 1976 to 1988, when he was appointed a superior court judge for the District of Columbia. In 1993 he returned to the Justice Dept. as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, becoming the first African American to serve in that position. He subsequently served as deputy attorney general (1997-2001) under Janet Reno and was briefly acting U.S. attorney general (2001). In private practice from 2001, he was nominated to be U.S. attorney general in 2009 by President Barack Obama; Holder is the first African American to be named to the post.

Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr., 1895-1971, American lawyer and public official, b. Boston. Admitted to the bar in 1916, he served in World War I and was a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. Resigning in protest against the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Berle returned to practice law in New York City and later became (1927) professor of corporate law at Columbia. As a specialist in corporation law and finance, he was a member of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Brain Trust and helped shape much of the banking and securities legislation of the New Deal. As Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs (1938-44), Berle attended many inter-American conferences and acted as spokesman for Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. After serving (1945-46) as ambassador to Brazil, he resumed his professorship at Columbia and was a founder and chairman (1952-55) of the Liberal party. In 1961, Berle headed a task force for President John F. Kennedy that recommended the Alliance for Progress. His well-known writings include the classic study The Modern Corporation and Private Property (with G. C. Means, 1933, rev. ed. 1968), The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (1954), Tides of Crisis (1957), Power without Property (1959), and Power (1969). A selection of his papers was edited by B. B. Berle and T. B. Jacobs (1973).

Biden, Joseph Robinette, Jr., 1942-, Vice President of the United States (2009-), b. Scranton, Pa. A lawyer and Democrat, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware, where his family had moved when he was young, in 1972, and was reelected six times, retiring in 2009. He served as chairman of the Senate judiciary (1987-95) and foreign relations (2001-3, 2007-8) committees, and was a prominent Democratic spokesman on foreign policy issues while in the Senate. Twice an unsuccessful candidate for the presidential nomination, he was chosen by the 2008 Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, to be his running mate. In the Nov., 2008, election the Democratic ticket defeated Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Cordero, Angel Tomás, Jr., 1942-, Puerto Rican jockey, b. Santurce. When he retired in 1992 he had won 7,057 races in 22 years. From 1977 to 1990 his mounts won over $5 million each year, a record. In 1976 he won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont on Bold Forbes. He also won the Derby in 1974 (Cannonade) and 1985 (Spend a Buck), and the Preakness in 1980 (Codex) and 1984 (Gate Dancer). On retirement he returned to San Juan, trained horses, rode again briefly in 1995, and became a jockeys' agent.

Richards, Dickinson Woodruff, Jr., 1895-1973, American physician and physiologist, b. Orange, N.J., grad. Yale, 1917, M.D. Columbia, 1923. He joined the staff of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 1928 and became professor of medicine in 1945. He shared with André F. Cournand and Werner Forssmann the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work in developing a technique whereby a catheter can be inserted through a vein into the heart. This technique facilitates study of the condition of the heart in health and in disease.

Ripken, Cal, Jr. (Calvin Edward Ripken, Jr.), 1960-, American baseball player, b. Havre de Grace, Md. The son of a long-time coach and manager in the Baltimore Orioles organization, he joined the team in 1981 as a third baseman. In 1982 he became the Orioles' regular shortstop and was named Rookie of the Year. On May 30 of that year he began a streak of consecutive games played that attained a climax on Sept. 6, 1995, when it reached 2,131, breaking the "record that should stand for all time" set by Lou Gehrig. Not merely an "iron man," Ripken had 431 home runs and 3,184 hits, set numerous fielding marks, and was the American League's Most Valuable Player in 1983 and 1991. He became symbolic to many of virtues perceived as disappearing from American sports: hard work, persistence, and modesty. His streak ended at 2,632 games on Sept. 20, 1998, and he retired three years later. Ripken was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007.

Barr, Alfred Hamilton, Jr., 1902-81, American art historian, b. Detroit. Barr taught art history at several colleges and was the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. He organized more than 100 museum exhibitions and wrote a number of standard art history texts. These include Cubism and Abstract Art (1936); Picasso (1946); Matisse (1951).

Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr., 1917-2007, American historian and public official, b. Columbus, Ohio, as Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; son of Arthur Meier Schlesinger. He achieved early success as a historian with the publication, the year after his graduation, of his Harvard honors thesis, Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress (1939). In World War II he served with the Office of War Information (1942-43) and the Office of Strategic Services (1943-45), and he was professor of history at Harvard from 1946 to 1961. His Age of Jackson (1945), a brilliant reinterpretation of the social, political, and economic aspects of the era, stimulated numerous American historians to reexamine Jacksonian America and won the Pulitzer Prize. The Age of Roosevelt (3 vol., 1957-60) is a sweeping narrative and analysis of the New Deal period in U.S. history, written from a strongly sympathetic viewpoint. Active in liberal politics, Schlesinger was a cofounder of the Americans for Democratic Action (1947). He served as an assistant to Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, and in 1961 President Kennedy appointed him special assistant for Latin American affairs. His study of Kennedy's White House years, A Thousand Days (1965), won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. He began teaching at the City Univ. of New York Graduate Center in 1966 and became an emeritus professor in 1994. His other works include The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949). The Politics of Hope (1963), The Bitter Heritage (1968), The Imperial Presidency (1973), Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (1978), The Cycles of American History (1986), and War and the American Presidency (2004).

Clay, Cassius Marcellus, Jr.: see Ali, Muhammad.

Bedford, Gunning, Jr., 1747-1812, American political leader, b. Philadelphia. Settling in Delaware, Bedford became a member of the local legislature, attorney general (1784-89), and a delegate to the Continental Congress (1783-85). At the Federal Constitutional Convention (1787) he opposed a strong central government and was a vigorous champion of the rights of small states.

Bentsen, Lloyd Millard, Jr., 1921-2006, American political leader and U.S. secretary of the treasury (1993-94), b. Mission, Tex. He received a law degree from the Univ. of Texas in 1942 and served as a B-24 squadron commander during World War II. A Democrat, he served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1949-55) before starting a successful insurance business in Houston. Returning to politics in 1970, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating George H. W. Bush. Serving in the Senate (1971-93), Bentsen was a stalwart defender of Texas business interests such as the oil and gas industry and of international trade. From 1987 to 1993 he was chairman of the Senate finance committee. In the 1988 presidential election, the Democratic ticket of Michael Dukakis and Bentsen was defeated by George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle. As secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton, Bentsen helped shepherd through Congress the 1993 deficit-reduction bill, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the accord establishing the World Trade Organization.

Blount, Winton Malcolm, Jr., 1921-, U.S. postmaster general (1969-71), b. Union Springs, Ala. A successful building contractor, he was (1946-68) president and chairman of the board of Blount Brothers Corp. After serving (1968) as president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Blount became (1969) postmaster general in President Richard M. Nixon's cabinet. He ended the patronage filling of postmaster vacancies and presided over (1971) the shift of the U.S. Post Office from a cabinet department to a nonprofit government-owned corporation, the U.S. Postal Service; Blount became the first chairman of the new corporation In 1972 he ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Alabama, and in 1973 he returned to head his company, now Blount International, Inc.

Jones, Robert Tyre, Jr. (Bobby Jones), 1902-71, American golfer, b. Atlanta, Ga. A lawyer, he became a golf devotee. Jones won the National Open (1923, 1926, 1929-30), the National Amateur (1924-25, 1927-28, 1930), and the British Open (1926-27, 1930). A perfectionist given to temper tantrums in his younger years, he came to be admired for his unfailing sportsmanship. In 1930 Jones became the only player ever to achieve golf's grand slam—winning in the same year the National Open, the National Amateur, the British Open, and the British Amateur championships. He then retired from tournament play. Along with Alister McKenzie he designed the Augusta National Golf Course and founded the Masters there in 1934. In 1948 he suffered a crippling spinal cord injury that eventually caused his death.

Jordan, Vernon Eulion, Jr., 1935-, African-American civil-rights leader and lawyer, b. Atlanta, Ga. A graduate of the Howard Univ. Law School, he was executive director (1970-71) of the United Negro College Fund and president (1972-81) of the National Urban League. After being wounded (1980) by a sniper in Fort Wayne, Ind., he retired to law practice in Washington, D.C. In 1992-93 he was head of the transition team for incoming president Bill Clinton, for whom he became an influential adviser. In 2006 he served as a member of the Iraq Study Group.

Lucas, George W., Jr., 1944-, American film director, producer, and writer, b. Modesto, Calif. Although Lucas's first film, THX-1138 (1970), was not successful, his next two, American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977), set the course for filmmaking in the next decade. The first made song scores an acceptable alternative to symphonic orchestrations; the second presented a simple action scenario bolstered by amazing special effects. Both were tremendously successful, the latter becoming the first film to top $200 million at the box office. Lucas then formed Lucasfilm (which has since become a business conglomerate) and produced two further installments of the Star Wars tale, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). In both films he promoted a special effects-driven aesthetic through the formation of Industrial Light and Magic, a company that produces state-of-the-art effects for films.

Lucas also produced the popular Indiana Jones trilogy, which mixed spectacular stunt work with a seriallike content of inescapable traps from which the stalwart hero escapes. In addition, he has provided financial sponsorship for more traditional work, such as Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985). In 1987 he won a special Academy Award for lifetime achievement. By the early 1990s he controlled a large, multifaceted entertainment business empire. Lucas has also produced, written, and directed three additional installments of the Star Wars cycle, "prequels" entitled The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005).

Glenn, John Herschel, Jr., 1921-, American astronaut and politician, b. Cambridge, Ohio. On Feb. 20, 1962, he became the first American and the third person to orbit the earth, circling the globe three times in a vehicle launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. After leaving the space program, Glenn entered Ohio politics and was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1974. Known for his work on military issues, he campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1984. In Oct., 1998, Glenn went into orbit again, on a space shuttle mission, to test effects of space on the elderly. In 1999 he retired from the Senate.

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 1908-72, American politician and clergyman, b. New Haven, Conn. In 1937 he became pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, and he soon became known as a militant black leader. He was elected to the city council of New York in 1941, and was elected for the first time to the U.S. Congress in 1945. Although a Democrat, he campaigned for President Eisenhower in 1956. As chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor after 1960, he acquired a reputation for flamboyance and disregard of convention. In Mar., 1967, he was excluded by the House of Representatives, which had accused him of misuse of House funds, contempt of New York court orders concerning a 1963 libel judgment against him, and conduct unbecoming a member. He was overwhelmingly reelected in a special election in 1967 and again in 1968. He was seated in the 1969 Congress but fined $25,000 and deprived of his seniority. In June, 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his exclusion from the House had been unconstitutional. Powell was defeated for reelection in 1970.

Powell, Lewis Franklin, Jr., 1907-98, American lawyer, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1971-87), b. Suffolk, Va. He studied law at Washington and Lee Univ. and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1931. He had a successful law practice in Richmond and held several local offices. Powell also held several prestigious positions, including president of the American Bar Association and chairman of the Virginia Board of Education. After repeatedly declining President Nixon's requests to join the Supreme Court, he finally accepted (1971) the post. Respected as a conservative in his jurisprudence, he was socially liberal, particularly in his ardent support of school integration. On the Supreme Court, he proved his moderate stance on various issues, voting with the majority in the landmark abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade. His best-known opinion was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which he upheld the principle of affirmative action while rejecting the use of quotas. He was often the swing vote on closely contested decisions.

Arledge, Roone Pinckney, Jr., 1931-2002, American television executive, b. Forest Hills, N.Y., grad. Columbia (B.A., 1952). He was a producer-director (1955-60) at the National Broadcasting Company before joining the American Broadcasting Company where during three decades he made revolutionary changes in television sports and news production. Arledge created classic live sports programs, including "Wide World of Sports" (1961) and "Monday Night Football" (1968), and produced (1964-88) broadcasts of ten Olympic Games. Among his innovations were the production of sports events in prime time; the presentation of new sports on television; the use of moving and hand-held cameras, slow motion, instant replay, and other technologies; and the introduction of biographical segments on athletes. His successful shows was a key factor in the proliferation of sports programming on television. Arledge became president of ABC News in 1977 and within a decade the also-ran was America's dominant television news division. He introduced such popular programs as "World News Tonight," "20/20," and "Nightline" and attracted a wide variety of popular anchors, corrrespondents, sports announcers, and commentators to ABC.

Young, Andrew Jackson, Jr., 1932-, African-American leader, clergyman, and public official, b. New Orleans. He was a leading civil-rights activist in the 1960s and, as a Democrat from Georgia, served (1973-77) in the U.S. House of Representatives. Under President Carter, Young was permanent representative to the UN (1977-79) and was noted for his outspokenness. He served as mayor of Atlanta (1982-90) and ran for, but failed to win, the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia in 1990. In 1999 he was elected to a two-year term as head of the National Council of Churches.

Curl, Robert Floyd, Jr., 1933-, American chemist, b. Alice, Tex., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1957. Curl has been a professor at Rice Univ. in Houston, Tex., since 1958. In 1996 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Richard Smalley and Harold Kroto for the discovery of fullerenes, which are carbon atoms bound in the form of a ball. Since the initial breakthrough by the three researchers, a number of structural variations on fullerenes have been developed, and much research has focused on exploring potential applications. These materials offer high heat resistance and superconductivity and have laid the foundation for work in the field of nanotechnology.

Chavis, Benjamin Franklin, Jr.: see Muhammad, Benjamin Franklin.

Connally, John Bowden, Jr., 1917-93, U.S. public official, b. Floresville, Tex. A lawyer, he became associated with Lyndon B. Johnson, managed the latter's successful senatorial campaign in 1948, and later served as Johnson's administrative assistant. He was named secretary of the navy in 1961, but he resigned (1962) to campaign for the governorship of Texas and was elected. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Connally was accompanying him and was wounded. He was twice reelected governor, serving until 1968. A conservative Democrat, he was chosen (1971) by President Richard M. Nixon as secretary of the treasury and was instrumental in bringing about the institution of a 90-day wage-price freeze in Aug., 1971. In May, 1972, Connally resigned from the cabinet to aid the president's reelection. The following year Connally joined the Republican party and served a short term as a special adviser to the President after the resignation of key aides as a result of the Watergate affair.

Tolbert, William Richard, Jr., 1913-80, president of Liberia (1971-80). In government since 1935, he was vice president (1951-71), succeeding to the Presidency upon Tubman's death in 1971. Instituting reforms to close the disparity between Americo-Liberians and indigens, he raised expectations while the economy failed, stimulating opposition, a national strike, and a military coup (1980) in which he was killed.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-68, American clergyman and civil-rights leader, b. Atlanta, Ga., grad. Morehouse College (B.A., 1948), Crozer Theological Seminary (B.D., 1951), Boston Univ. (Ph.D., 1955). The son of the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King became (1954) minister of the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. He led the black boycott (1955-56) of segregated city bus lines and in 1956 gained a major victory and prestige as a civil-rights leader when Montgomery buses began to operate on a desegregated basis.

King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which gave him a base to pursue further civil-rights activities, first in the South and later nationwide. His philosophy of nonviolent resistance led to his arrest on numerous occasions in the 1950s and 60s. His campaigns had mixed success, but the protest he led in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 brought him worldwide attention. He spearheaded the Aug., 1963, March on Washington, which brought together more than 200,000 people. The protests he led helped to assure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The following year King and the SCLC led a campaign for African-American voter registration centered on Selma, Ala. A nonviolent march from Selma to Montgomery was attacked by police who beat and teargassed the protestors, but it ultimately succeeded on the third try when the National Guard and federal troops were mobilized. The events in Selma provoked national outrage, and months later aroused public opinion did much to precipitate passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

King's leadership in the civil-rights movement was challenged in the mid-1960s as others grew more militant. His interests, however, widened from civil rights to include criticism of the Vietnam War and a deeper concern over poverty. His plans for a Poor People's March to Washington were interrupted (1968) for a trip to Memphis, Tenn., in support of striking sanitation workers. On Apr. 4, 1968, he was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel (since 1991 a civil-rights museum).

James Earl Ray, a career criminal, pleaded guilty to the murder and was convicted, but he soon recanted, claiming he was duped into his plea. Ray's conviction was subsequently upheld, but he eventually received support from members of King's family, who believed King to have been the victim of a conspiracy. Ray died in prison in 1998. In a jury trial in Memphis in 1999 the King family won a wrongful-death judgment against Loyd Jowers, who claimed (1993) that he had arranged the killing for a Mafia figure. Many experts, however, were unconvinced by the verdict, and in 2000, after an 18-month investigation, the Justice Dept. discredited Jowers and concluded that there was no evidence of an assassination plot.

King wrote Stride toward Freedom (1958), Why We Can't Wait (1964), and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967). His birthday is a national holiday, celebrated on the third Monday in January. King's wife, Coretta Scott King, carried on various aspects of his work until her death in 2006. She also wrote My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1969, rev. ed. 1993).

Haig, Alexander Meigs, Jr., 1924-, American general and public official, U.S. Secretary of State (1981-82), b. Philadelphia, grad. West Point, 1947. He served in Korea (1950-51) and held several staff positions, including military assistant to the Secretary of the Army (1964), before serving in Vietnam (1966-67). As military adviser to Henry Kissinger (1969-73) he became an important member of the National Security Council staff. During the later stages of the Watergate affair he served as President Nixon's civilian chief of staff (1973-74). A four-star general, he served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's forces (1974-79). In 1981 he became President Reagan's Secretary of State. His sudden resignation (1982) was attributed to disagreements over foreign policy. In 1988, he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination.

Halsey, William Frederick, Jr. (Bull Halsey), 1882-1959, American admiral, b. Elizabeth, N.J., grad. Annapolis, 1904. In World War II he led (Jan., 1942) a spectacular carrier raid against the Marshall Islands and Gilbert Islands, and during the campaign in the Solomon Islands he assumed command of the South Pacific area. As commander (1944-45) of the U.S. 3d Fleet, he commanded the naval action in the Philippines, won the battle of Leyte Gulf (Oct., 1944) and led (July, 1945) the seaborne bombardment of Japan. He was promoted (Nov., 1945) to fleet admiral (five-star admiral) and retired in 1947. His experiences in World War II were published as Admiral Halsey's Story (1947).

Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr., 1868-1953, American art critic and teacher, b. Deep River, Conn., grad. Williams, 1889, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1892. He taught (1893-1900) at Williams and was professor (1910-33) of art and archaeology at Princeton. Art critic of the New York Evening Post and other papers, he also wrote many books.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. 1922-2007, American novelist, b. Indianapolis. After serving in a World War II combat unit, he worked as a police reporter. Marked by wry black humor, Vonnegut's satirical, pessimistic, and morally urgent novels frequently protest the horrors of the 20th cent., as in the best-selling Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; film, 1972). His fiction spoke with particular forcefulness to the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 70s. Vonnegut's books frequently include elements of science fiction, featuring fantastic plots and sometimes involving such devices as trips in outer space, time faults, and apocalyptic destruction. Among his other novels are Player Piano (1952), Mother Night (1961; film, 1996), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Breakfast of Champions (1973; film, 1999), Deadeye Dick (1983), Bluebeard (1987), and the novel-memoir Timequake (1997). He also wrote short stories, plays, and essays, e.g., the collections Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974), The Man without a Country (2005), and the posthumously published Armageddon in Retrospect (2008).

Maxwell, William Keepers, Jr., 1908-2000, American novelist, short-story writer, and editor, b. Lincoln, Ill. Educated at the Univ. of Illinois and Harvard, he began his career as a teacher, but soon turned to writing. In his fiction the discreet and courtly Maxwell often handled such traditional themes as growing up and the impact of death with a deft, spare, and gentle realism, frequently setting his tales in the early-20th-cent. Midwest of his youth. His six novels include Bright Center of Heaven (1934), They Came like Swallows (1937), Time Will Darken It (1948), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). His stories are collected in All the Days and Nights (1995) and his essays in The Outermost Dream (1989). Maxwell also wrote children's stories and a memoir, Ancestors (1972). As the superb and subtle fiction editor of the New Yorker for 40 years (1936-76), he helped to shape the work of many of the century's finest writers, including Vladimir Nabakov, John Updike, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Hara, Eudora Welty, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Mays, Willie Howard, Jr. ("Say Hey" Willie Mays), 1931-, American baseball player, b. Fairfield, Ala. He began his professional career at 17 with the Black Barons of the Negro National League. In 1951 he joined the New York Giants of the National League and led them to a world championship in 1954. Mays was a superb center fielder, an exciting baserunner, and an excellent hitter. Four times (1955, 1962, 1964-65) he led the league in home runs, four times in stolen bases, and he was the batting champion in 1954. In 1954 and 1965 Mays was voted most valuable player. He retired in 1973 after playing his final season with the pennant-winning New York Mets, having hit 660 home runs, the fourth highest total on record.

McClellan, George Brinton, Jr., 1865-1940, American politician and educator, b. Dresden, Saxony, Germany; son of Gen. George B. McClellan. He studied law and joined (1889) Tammany Hall, becoming one of its most prominent orators. He was president of the board of aldermen of New York City (1893-94), served as a Democrat in Congress (1895-1903), and was mayor of New York (1903-9). While serving as mayor, he broke with Tammany boss Charles Murphy over patronage, thereby ending his political career. Afterward he taught at Princeton, where he was professor of economic history from 1912 to his retirement in 1931. McClellan, an authority on Venetian history, wrote Venice and Bonaparte (1931) and Modern Italy (1933).

McEnroe, John Patrick, Jr., 1959-, American tennis player, b. Weisbaden, West Germany. He grew up in Douglaston, Queens, N.Y. After winning the National Collegiate Athletic Association singles title while a student at Stanford Univ. (1978), he turned professional, playing that year for the first of many times on the U.S. Davis Cup team. In 1979 he won the first of four U.S. Open titles (the others were in 1980-81 and 1984); his three Wimbledon singles titles came in 1981 and 1983-84. During a career in which his chief rivals were Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl, McEnroe was often ranked first in the world. He was noted for his abrasive manner and displays of temper, especially in his earlier years. On retiring from the tour in 1993, he became a television tennis commentator and has since sometimes played on the senior circuit and (more rarely) the ATP Tour.

Williams, Robert R., Jr., 1886-1965, American chemist, b. India, grad. Univ. of Chicago (B.S., 1907); brother of Roger John Williams. Research undertaken in 1910, while he was chemist (1908-15) at the Manila Bureau of Science, the Philippines, culminated, during his association (1925-45) with the Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York City, in his isolation (1933) of vitamin B₁ (thiamine) from a syrup of rice polishings. In 1936 he synthesized the vitamin. He was director of grants of the Research Corp., New York City (1945-51). Williams is noted also for his work in alipathic chemistry and in rubber chemistry.

Carter, Elliott Cook, Jr., 1908-, American composer, b. New York City. Carter is considered by many to be the most important contemporary American composer. He studied with Walter Piston, E. B. Hill, and Gustav Holst at Harvard and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (1932-35). Carter's complex mature music is organized into highly intellectualized contrapuntal patterns to which sympathetic listeners attribute great emotional power. He characteristically uses tempo as an element of form, notably in his technique of "metric modulation," his most famous musical innovation. Highlights from an unusually long and prolific musical career include the ballet Pocahontas (1939), a cello and piano sonata (1948), five string quartets (1951, 1958-59, 1973, 1986, 1995), Variations (1953-55) for orchestra, a piano concerto (1966), a concerto for orchestra (1969), A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1976) for soprano and nine players to poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Night Fantasies (1980) for piano, Changes (1983) for guitar, Adagio Tenebroso (1995) for orchestra, the opera What's Next? (1999), and a cello concerto (2001) composed for Yo-Yo Ma.

Gordy, Berry, Jr., 1929-, African-American music-industry executive, b. Detroit. After stints in the army and as a professional boxer, Gordy opened a Detroit record store and began to write songs and produce records. He founded (1959) Motown Records, and its success made him the first African-American owner of a top recording company. Gordy transformed the company into a music empire, developing the "Motown sound," a pop-, gospel-, and rhythm-and-blues-inflected crossover version of soul that revolutionized American popular music in the 1960s. His first big hit, "Shop Around" (1961) by Smokey Robinson (with whom Gordy wrote several songs) and the Miracles, was followed by hundreds of chart-topping singles by various artists. Gordy discovered or developed many of the era's great performers—including also the Four Tops, the Temptations, Jackie Wilson, Mary Wells, Martha Reeves, Gladys Knight, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, and Diana Ross and the Supremes—backing them with a talented staff of in-house songwriters, producers, and musicians. In the 1970s Gordy moved Motown to Los Angeles and began producing films, notably Lady Sings the Blues (1972) starring Diana Ross. He sold Motown in 1988, the year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Gore, Albert Arnold, Jr., 1948-, Vice President of the United States (1993-2001), b. Washington, D.C., grad. Harvard, 1969. After serving in the army in Vietnam and working as a reporter, he was elected (1976) to the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee as a Democrat. In the Senate (1985-93), Gore emerged as a defender of environmental causes and an authority on nuclear arms control; his concerns for the environment were spelled out in his book Earth in the Balance (1992). In 1988 he was unsuccessful in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, but, in 1992, Bill Clinton chose him as his running mate. As vice president, Gore formulated policy for reducing the cost and size of the federal government and was an advocate for the Internet and for environmental protection.

In 1996, Clinton and Gore were reelected. Gore immediately was regarded as the leading candidate for his party's 2000 presidential nomination; he began actively campaigning in 1999 and won a majority of the Democratic delegates early in 2000. Gore chose Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate. Despite winning the popular vote, the Democratic ticket lost to Republicans George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Gore's campaign was hurt by the Green party candidate, Ralph Nader, and the extremely narrow loss of Florida's electoral votes. Gore sought manual recounts of computer punch card ballots from heavily Democratic Florida counties, but ultimately lost (Dec. 12) in the Supreme Court, which split 5-4 along ideological lines. Subsequent studies of the ballots by newspapers indicated (2001) that the outcome of the election in Florida depended on the method used to recount the ballots and on the counties whose votes were recounted. The legal, political, and media battles fought over the election, as well as the delay in finalizing the results, made the 2000 presidential vote the most contentious since the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876.

Soon after the election, Gore began teaching journalism at Columbia. In 2005 he cofounded Current TV, a news and features network on which a significant portion of the programming is created by its viewers. Gore also renewed his work on behalf of the environment, which crested in 2006 with the publication of his book An Inconvenient Truth and the documentary film of the same name (Academy Award, 2007); both deal with the perils of global warming. In 2007 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their efforts to alert people to the threats posed by climate change caused by human activity and for their work in helping to disseminate information on possible solutions. Later that year he became a partner in a private equity firm with strong interests in "green" technology. He also received the $1 million Dan David Present Prize for his environmental work in 2008. Gore is the son of Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., 1907-98, a politician and Democratic senator from Tennessee (1953-71).

Shepard, Alan Bartlett, Jr., 1923-98, American astronaut, b. East Derry, N.H., grad. Annapolis, 1944. He served on a destroyer during World War II and later had extensive experience as a test pilot. On May 5, 1961, under the U.S. space program Project Mercury, he became the first American to be launched into space. His flight was a suborbital trip of 302 mi (486 km) down the Atlantic missile range. He reached a height of 115 mi (185 km) and performed several maneuvers of his capsule, Freedom 7, during the 15-min flight. In 1971, he commanded the Apollo 14 lunar landing, becoming the fifth person to walk on the moon. In 1974, Shepard retired from both NASA and the U.S. navy (as a rear admiral) to enter private industry. With Deke Slayton, another original Mercury astronaut, he wrote Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon (1994).

Shippen, William, Jr., 1736-1808, American surgeon, b. Philadelphia, M.D. Edinburgh, 1761. A pioneer lecturer on anatomy and midwifery, he was instrumental in the organization (1765) at the College of Philadelphia (later the Univ. of Pennsylvania) of the first medical school in the United States, where he served as professor of anatomy and surgery. The actual plans for the medical school were drawn up by John Morgan, but Shippen claimed that Morgan had taken over his idea, and a bitter rivalry grew up. Shippen succeeded Morgan as head of the army medical service; both men were court-martialed on charges arising from their feud and were acquitted. Shippen afterward resumed teaching at the medical school.

Graham, Otto Everett, Jr.,1921-2003, American football player and coach, b. Waukegan, Ill. He was an All-American football and basketball player at Northwestern Univ. before he joined the Cleveland Browns in 1946 after serving in the Navy (1944-5) and briefly playing professional basketball. Playing at quarterback, Graham led the Browns to ten championship games and seven titles (1946-9 in the All-America Football Conference; 1950 and 1954-5 in the National Football League. An outstanding passer, he was a four-time NFL All-Pro player before he retired in 1955. He coached at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (1959-66), where he was also athletic director (1959-66, 1970-85), and for the Washington Redskins (1966-8).

Gravely, Samuel Lee, Jr., 1922-2004, U.S. naval officer, the first African American to hold the rank of admiral, b. Richmond, Va. Joining the Naval Reserves in 1942, he became (1944) the first African American officer commissioned by the Naval Reserve Officer Training Course, serving until 1946. Recalled to active duty in 1949, he rose through the ranks, joining the regular Navy (1955) and becoming the first black American to command a U.S. warship (the destroyer Falgout) in 1962. After holding other commands, he was promoted to rear admiral in 1971 and vice admiral in 1976, when he also assumed command of the 3d Fleet. Gravely retired in 1980.

Brennan, William Joseph, Jr., 1906-97, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1956-90), b. Newark, N.J. After receiving his law degree from Harvard, he practiced law in Newark. He served as a New Jersey superior court judge (1949-50), appellate division judge (1950-52), and state supreme court justice (1952-56). In 1956 President Eisenhower appointed him to succeed Sherman Minton on the Supreme Court. Brennan became noted as a supporter of individual liberties and guarantees of justice to the poor. In the last two decades of his long service, he was a liberal stalwart among increasingly conservative colleagues; many of his 1,360 opinions were dissents.

Brewster, Kingman, Jr., 1919-88, American educator and public official, b. Longmeadow, Mass., grad. Yale (A.B., 1941) and Harvard (LL.B., 1948). He was a professor of law at Harvard (1950-60) and president of Yale (1963-77), where as an opponent of the Vietnam War, he skillfully handled student demonstrations during that turbulent period. From 1977 to 1981, he was U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Brewster remained in London as the representative of American law firm. In 1986, he became master of University College, London.

Stettinius, Edward Reilly, Jr., 1900-1949, American statesman and industrialist, b. Chicago. He held (1926-34) several executive posts in the General Motors Corp., and in 1938 he became chairman of the board of the U.S. Steel Corp. He resigned (1940) as a business executive to join the National Defense Advisory Commission. After serving as priorities director in the Office of Production Management and as lend-lease administrator (1941-43), he was (1943-44) Undersecretary of State and presided at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944). Succeeding (Nov., 1944) Cordell Hull as Secretary of State, Stettinius attended the Yalta Conference and was chairman of the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco Conference. He resigned (June, 1945) his cabinet post and served (1945-46) as U.S. representative to the United Nations. He wrote Roosevelt and the Russians (1949).

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 1902-85, American public official and diplomat, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts (1937-44, 1947-53), b. Nahant, Mass.; grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge. He was a journalist on the Boston Evening Transcript and then on the New York Herald Tribune until 1931 and a member of the Massachusetts legislature from 1933 to 1936. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1936 and reelected in 1942, he served until his resignation to enter the army in World War II. Lodge was returned to the Senate in 1946, but in 1952, despite the nationwide Republican landslide, he was defeated by the Democrat John F. Kennedy. An early supporter of Dwight D. Eisenhower (he was his campaign manager in 1952), he was then appointed (1953) U.S. representative at the United Nations, serving until 1960. In 1960, he was the Republican candidate for Vice President on the unsuccessful ticket headed by Richard M. Nixon. He served as U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam in 1963-64 and again from 1965 to 1967, was (1968-69) ambassador to West Germany, and was (1969) chief U.S. representative to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam. He wrote The Stream Has Many Eyes (1973), a personal memoir.

Roberts, John Glover, Jr., 1955-, American public official, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (2005-) b. Buffalo, N.Y., grad. Harvard (B.A. 1976, J.D. 1979). He clerked (1980-81) for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist before serving in the Reagan administration as special assistant to the attorney general (1981-82) and associate counsel to the president (1982-86). From 1986 on, he was in private practice except for the years he served under President George H. W. Bush as principal deputy solicitor general (1989-93). His nominations to the U.S. court of appeals by President Bush in 1992 and President George W. Bush in 2001 were not voted on, but he was renominated in 2003 and confirmed. In 2005 he was nominated by President G. W. Bush to the Supreme Court and, after Rehnquist's death several months later, was then named and confirmed as chief justice. Intelligent with a sharp legal mind, Roberts was an advocate of conservative positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations but was nonetheless a relative unknown judicially at the time of his confirmation to the Supreme Court because of the short time he had served on the appeals court.

Rodino, Peter Wallace, Jr., 1909-2005, U.S. congressman, b. Newark, N.J., as Pellegrino Rodino, Jr.; grad. New Jersey Law School, 1937. Awarded the Bronze Star while serving (1941-46) in the army during World War II, he returned to his hometown and won election in 1948 to the U.S. House of Representatives. A liberal Democrat, he sponsored civil-rights and immigration-reform legislation, and in 1973 became chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The following year he chaired the hearings that passed three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon as a result of the Watergate affair, which led the president to resign. Rodino was a law professor after his retirement (1989) from Congress.

Davis, Benjamin Oliver, Jr., 1912-2002, American air force general, b. Washington, D.C.; son of Benjamin Oliver Davis. After studying at Western Reserve and Chicago universities, he attended West Point, graduating in 1936. At the academy, Davis was the only African American in a white student body and was ostracized by the majority of the cadets, who would speak to him only in the line of duty. Following graduation he served as an infantry officer, entered the U.S. air force, and completed his flight training in 1942. During World War II he distinguished himself as a combat pilot, leading the Tuskegee Airmen. In 1954, Davis became the first African-American general in the U.S. air force; from 1965 to 1970 he served as lieutenant general. In 1971 he became an assistant secretary for the department of transportation, leaving the department in 1975.

Davis, Raymond, Jr., 1914-2006, American astrochemist, Ph.D. Yale Univ. 1942. Davis was a researcher at Monsanto Chemical Company (1946-48) and Brookhaven National Laboratory (1948-84). In 1984 he was named a research professor at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, a position he held until his death in 2006. Davis received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics with Riccardo Giacconi and Masatoshi Koshiba for pioneering contributions to astrophysics. Davis and Koshiba are credited with detecting cosmic neutrinos, the most elusive particles in the universe. Their work led to a new field of research known as neutrino astronomy, which is of importance to particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.

Sloan, Alfred Pritchard, Jr., 1875-1966, American businessman and philanthropist, b. New Haven, Conn., grad. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1895. He began his career as a draftsman for the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company, becoming its president in 1901; under his leadership the income and assets of the company were greatly increased. He sold the company to General Motors in 1916 and later became its president. As head of General Motors, Sloan inaugurated "standard procedures" (i.e., rules to effect better management); he was chairman of the board from 1937 to 1956. His philanthropic interests extended to many institutions, including the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and the Sloan Foundation. He wrote My Years with General Motors (1964).

Martin, Paul Edgar Philippe, Jr., 1938-, Canadian politician, prime minister (2003-6) of Canada, b. Windsor, Ont. The scion of a politically active family (his father served in parliament and ran unsuccessfully for Liberal party leader three times), Martin became a lawyer (1966) and president of Canada Steamship Lines (1974), which he later purchased. Elected as a Liberal to parliament in 1988, he made an unsuccessful bid for the party leadership post two years later. In 1993, Martin became finance minister under Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, and by the late 1990s had brought the federal budget out of deficit, making a name for himself as a fiscal conservative. By 2001, Martin was actively maneuvering to succeed Chétien, a situation that led the prime minister to fire the more popular Martin as finance minister in 2002. In Oct., 2002, Chrétien announced he would not seek a fourth term, and Martin began campaigning openly for the leadership post, which he won in Nov., 2003. He succeeded Chrétien as prime minister the following month. Elections in June, 2004, returned Martin and his party to power, albeit as a minority government forced to contend with fallout from financial improprieties that occurred under Chrétien. His government fell in Nov., 2005, forcing him to call an election, which the Liberals lost (Jan., 2006), and Martin resigned as party leader.

Martin, William McChesney, Jr., 1906-98, U.S. banker, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1951-70), b. St. Louis. After an early career as a stockbroker, Martin became (1938) the first salaried president of the New York Stock Exchange. He served in World War II and then held high-level positions in the Export-Import Bank, the U.S. Treasury Dept., and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. President Harry Truman appointed him chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1951, and he held the position under six successive administrations until his retirement. Favoring a "hard money" policy, Martin fought to keep the Federal Reserve System independent of political control, and he opposed excessive expansion of the monetary supply, which he considered a major cause of inflation. He is considered the creator of the modern, independently operating Federal Reserve. He reentered private business after 1970.

Coffin, William Sloane, Jr., 1924-2006, American Protestant social activist, b. New York City. Strongly influenced by the social philosophy of Reinhold Niebuhr, Coffin became a leader in the civil-rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s when he was chaplain at his alma mater, Yale. As minister (1977-87) of Riverside Church in New York City he was involved with such social concerns as nuclear disarmament and the plight of war refugees. Subsequently remaining active in the international peace and disarmament movement, he continued to write, teach, and lecture; from 1987 to 1990 he headed SANE/Freeze. Among his books is A Passion for the Possible (1993).

Ailey, Alvin, Jr., 1931-89, American modern dancer and choreographer, b. Rogers, Tex. Ailey studied in Los Angeles with Lester Horton, whose strong, dramatic style and views about multiracial casting influenced his choreography and artistic direction. He moved to New York in 1954, where he studied dance with Martha Graham and Charles Weidman and acting with Stella Adler. In 1958 he formed his own company, the American Dance Theater, which, multiracial since 1963, has been internationally acclaimed and has brought recognition to many African-American and Asian dancers. Typically, Ailey's work combines jazz, modern, and African dance elements.

In addition to Revelations (1960), which is generally viewed as his masterpiece, Ailey's best-known works include Blues Suite (1958), Creation of the World (1961), Roots of the Blues (1961), Hermit Songs (1962), Cry (1971), Hidden Rites (1973), Night Creature (1975), and At the Edge of the Precipice (1983). He also choreographed a series of ballets to music by Duke Ellington, notably The River (1970), and created works for other companies, including the American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, the Paris Opéra Ballet, and the La Scala Opera Ballet. After his death, Judith Jamison replaced him as artistic director of his company which, renamed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, remains highly popular and respected.

Baker, Howard Henry, Jr., 1925-, U.S. politician and public official, b. Huntsville, Tenn. As a moderate Republican senator (1966-87) from Tennessee, he gained (1973) national attention as a member of the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair. He became (1977) Senate minority leader and served (1981-85) as Senate majority leader after the Republican victory in the 1980 elections. He also was White House chief of staff (1987-88) under President Ronald Reagan. In 1996 he married Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum (see Kassebaum-Baker, Nancy Landon). Baker served as U.S. ambassador to Japan from 2001 to 2005.

Watson, Thomas John, Jr., 1914-93, American industrialist, b. Dayton, Ohio. The son of Thomas John Watson, Sr., the founder of the International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), he joined the family business following his graduation from Brown Univ. in 1937. Except for service as a pilot in the Army Air Corps during World War II, he spent the rest of his career at IBM, becoming company president (1952-61), chairman (1961-71), and chairman of the executive board (1972-79). Watson early recognized the importance of computers and maintained IBM's dominance in that and other advanced technologies, while his management and marketing prowess turned IBM into a symbol of corporate excellence. An advocate for the reduction of nuclear arms, he was (1979-81) U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

in full Andrew Jackson Young, Jr.

(born March 12, 1932, New Orleans, La., U.S.) U.S. politician. He earned a divinity degree in 1955 and became a pastor at several African American churches in the South. Active in the civil rights movement, he worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1961–70). He served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1972–77). An early supporter of Jimmy Carter, he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN (1977–79), the first African American to hold the post. He served as mayor of Atlanta (1982–90).

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(born Nov. 11, 1922, Indianapolis, Ind., U.S.—died April 11, 2007, New York, N.Y.) U.S. novelist. He attended Cornell University and the University of Chicago. Captured by the Germans during World War II, he also survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden, an experience he made part of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; film, 1972). His pessimistic and satirical novels use fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization. They include Player Piano (1952), Cat's Cradle (1963), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Galápagos (1985), and Timequake (1997). A Man Without a Country (2005) is a collection of essays and speeches. Vonnegut also wrote plays and short stories.

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(born Feb. 3, 1926, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) American dancer, choreographer, and ballet director. He trained in modern dance with Hanya Holm and Martha Graham. Between 1946 and 1962 he danced in Broadway musical productions as well as with dance companies such as the American Ballet Theatre. He became a choreographer in 1962, forming his own company and creating Pierrot Lunaire. Subsequently he staged works with most of the major dance companies throughout the world. Tetley's work helped to bring about a synthesis of modern dance and classical ballet. His creative staging and daring, often sexual, subject matter were sometimes controversial, but he was praised for the passion and strong physicality of his work.

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(born Oct. 22, 1900, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—died Oct. 31, 1949, Greenwich, Conn.) U.S. industrialist and statesman. He worked for General Motors Corp., becoming a vice president in 1931. Joining U.S. Steel Corp. in 1934, he became chairman of the board in 1938. He was appointed chairman of the War Resources Board (1939–40) and administrator of lend-lease (1941–43). As U.S. secretary of state (1944–45), he advised Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference. He led the U.S. delegation to the UN organizing conference in San Francisco and was the first U.S. delegate to the UN (1945–46).

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(born May 23, 1875, New Haven, Conn., U.S.—died Feb. 17, 1966, New York, N.Y.) U.S. corporate executive. He began his career at the Hyatt Roller Bearing Co. in New Jersey and became its president at age 26. Hyatt was later acquired by General Motors Corp. (GM), and Sloan rose to become president and chief executive officer of GM in 1923. Under his leadership it surpassed Ford Motor Co. in sales and became the largest corporation in the world. He served as chairman of the board from 1937 to his retirement in 1956. A noted philanthropist, he endowed the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and contributed to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and to the school of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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(born Oct. 21, 1736, Philadelphia, Pa.—died July 11, 1808, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.) U.S. physician. He earned his M.D. in Edinburgh. In 1762 he established the first American maternity hospital, and in 1765, with John Morgan, he organized the first medical school in the American colonies, where he became the first systematic teacher of anatomy, surgery, and obstetrics. He was one of the first to use dissected human bodies to teach anatomy. He succeeded Morgan as head medical officer of the Continental Army in 1777. He was a founder and president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the first American medical school.

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(born Nov. 18, 1923, East Derry, N.H., U.S.—died July 21, 1998, Monterey, Calif.) U.S. astronaut. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served in the Pacific during World War II. In 1959 he became one of the original seven Mercury program astronauts. In May 1961, 23 days after Yury A. Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, Shepard made a 15-minute suborbital flight that reached an altitude of 115 mi (185 km). He later commanded the Apollo 14 flight (1971), the first to land in the lunar highlands. Retiring from NASA and the navy in 1974, he entered private business.

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(born Jan. 31, 1947, Refugio, Tex., U.S.) U.S. baseball pitcher. Ryan was signed to a New York Mets minor league team in 1965. He played for the Mets (1968–71), California Angels (1972–79), Houston Astros (1980–88), and Texas Rangers (1989–93). In 1983 he became the first pitcher to surpass Walter Johnson's 1927 record of 3,508 career strikeouts, and he retired in 1993 at the advanced age of 46 with an astonishing 5,714. He also set records for most strikeouts in a season (383 in 1973) and most no-hit games (7).

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(born Jan. 27, 1955, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.) 17th chief justice of the United States (2005– ). He earned a law degree (1979) from Harvard University, where he was the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review, and served as a law clerk (1980–81) to Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist, who later became chief justice. He held several positions in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, during which time he became noted for his apparent advocacy of strongly conservative legal viewpoints. In 2003 Pres. George W. Bush nominated Roberts to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; he was confirmed later that year. He held that post until 2005, when Bush nominated him to fill the vacancy left by the retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Shortly before Roberts's confirmation hearings began, Rehnquist died, prompting Bush to appoint Roberts chief justice. Quickly confirmed by the Senate (78–22), he was sworn in on Sept. 29, 2005.

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(born Aug. 24, 1960, Havre de Grace, Md., U.S.) U.S. baseball player. Ripken was born into a baseball family; his father and brother both played professionally. He played for the Baltimore Orioles from 1981. In 1990 he set single-season records for highest fielding percentage by a shortstop (.996) and fewest errors by a shortstop (3), and in 1993 he broke the home-run record for a shortstop. On Sept. 6, 1995, he broke Lou Gehrig's long-standing record of consecutive games played (2,130), eventually running his streak to 2,632 games before taking a day off in 1998. Ripken retired at the end of the 2001 season. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2007.

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(born Aug. 18, 1937, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.) U.S. film actor and director. He made his Broadway debut in 1959 and won acclaim in Barefoot in the Park (1963; film, 1967). The blond, appealing Redford began acting in films in the mid-1960s. He appeared with Paul Newman in the hits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) and also starred in The Candidate (1972), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), All the President's Men (1976), The Natural (1984), Out of Africa (1985), and Indecent Proposal (1993). His directorial debut, Ordinary People (1980, Academy Award), was followed by The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), A River Runs Through It (1992), Quiz Show (1994), The Horse Whisperer (1998), and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). He received an honorary Academy Award in 2001. In 1980 he founded the Sundance Institute to sponsor young filmmakers' works, and by the 1990s its film festival was the major showcase for U.S. independent films.

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(born Nov. 29, 1908, New Haven, Conn., U.S.—died April 4, 1972, Miami, Fla.) U.S. politician. In 1937 he succeeded his father as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York City, and built its membership to 13,000. Elected to the New York City Council in 1941, he became the first African American to serve on that body. In the U.S. House of Representatives (1945–67, 1969–71), he sponsored much social-welfare legislation, including a minimum wage act, antipoverty acts, and bills providing federal aid to education. Known for his flamboyance and his lack of concern for House decorum, he was the target of a libel suit and was investigated for financial misconduct. In 1967 the House voted to exclude him, but the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that the House's action was unconstitutional.

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(born June 13, 1928, Bluefield, W.Va., U.S.) U.S. mathematician. He earned a doctorate from Princeton University at 22. He began teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951 but left in the late 1950s because of mental illness; thereafter he was informally associated with Princeton. Beginning in the 1950s with his influential thesis “Non-cooperative Games,” Nash established the mathematical principles of game theory. His theory, known as the Nash solution or Nash equilibrium, attempted to explain the dynamics of threat and action among competitors. Despite its practical limitations, it was widely applied by business strategists. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics with John C. Harsanyi (b. 1920) and Reinhard Selten (b. 1930). A film version of his life, A Beautiful Mind (2001), won an Academy Award for best picture.

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(born May 11, 1891, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 6, 1967, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) U.S. public official. He was editor of American Agriculturist (1922–33) and a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt. As secretary of the treasury in Roosevelt's cabinet (1934–45), he was responsible for financing the programs of the New Deal and the enormous military expenditures of World War II. Over $370 billion was spent during the period, three times more money than was spent by the 50 previous secretaries of the treasury. He resigned after Roosevelt's death and retired to his farm.

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(born Feb. 16, 1959, Wiesbaden, W.Ger.) U.S. tennis player. He grew up in Douglaston, N.Y. An athletic serve-and-volley player, he won three consecutive U.S. Open singles h1s (1979–81) and a fourth in 1984. He also won the Wimbledon singles in 1981, 1983, and 1984, as well as several doubles h1s. Known for his temper tantrums and invective on court, he became the first player ejected from a grand-slam match in nearly 30 years.

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(born Jan. 15, 1929, Atlanta, Ga., U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tenn.) U.S. civil-rights leader. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers, King became an adherent of nonviolence while in college. Ordained a Baptist minister himself in 1954, he became pastor of a church in Montgomery, Ala.; the following year he received a doctorate from Boston University. He was selected to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, whose boycott efforts eventually ended the city's policies of racial segregation on public transportation. In 1957 he formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and began lecturing nationwide, urging active nonviolence to achieve civil rights for African Americans. In 1960 he returned to Atlanta to become copastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was arrested and jailed for protesting segregation at a lunch counter; the case drew national attention, and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy interceded to obtain his release. In 1963 King helped organize the March on Washington, an assembly of more than 200,000 protestors at which he made his famous “I have a dream” speech. The march influenced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and King was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1965 he was criticized from within the civil-rights movement for yielding to state troopers at a march in Selma, Ala., and for failing in the effort to change Chicago's housing segregation policies. Thereafter he broadened his advocacy, addressing the plight of the poor of all races and opposing the Vietnam War. In 1968 he went to Memphis, Tenn., to support a strike by sanitation workers; there on April 4, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray. A U.S. national holiday is celebrated in King's honour on the third Monday in January.

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in full Robert Tyre Jones, Jr.

(born March 17, 1902, Atlanta, Ga., U.S.—died Dec. 18, 1971, Atlanta) U.S. golfer. Jones won 13 major championships between 1923 and 1930, a feat unequaled until 1973. In 1930 he became the first golfer to achieve the grand-slam of his time—the British and U.S. Open and Amateur championships—after which he retired from competitive golf at the age of 28, having never become a professional. Jones helped establish the Masters Tournament, one of the four major tournaments that make up the modern grand-slam of golf (the other three being the British Open, the U.S. Open, and the PGA Championship).

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(born Sept. 16, 1950, Keyser, W.Va., U.S.) U.S. critic and scholar. Gates attended Yale University and the University of Cambridge. He has chaired Harvard University's department of Afro-American Studies for many years. In such works as Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey (1988) he has used the term signifyin' to represent a practice that can link African and African American literary histories; his other books include Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1998). He has edited many anthologies, including Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990) and the Norton Anthology of African American Writers (1997), and has restored and edited many lost works by black writers. He writes frequently to a general public, notably in The New Yorker, and he wrote the television series Wonders of the African World (1999).

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orig. James Fletcher Henderson

(born Dec. 18, 1898, Cuthbert, Ga., U.S.—died Dec. 29, 1952, New York, N.Y.) U.S. pianist, arranger, and leader of one of the most influential big bands in jazz. Henderson formed a dance band in New York in 1923. The band soon distinguished itself in two ways: the engagement of Louis Armstrong as principal soloist placed greater emphasis on swinging improvisation and the arrangements by Henderson and Don Redman (1900–64) codified the roles of the sections within the ensemble to replace the collective improvisation of early jazz groups. Nearly all big bands subsequently followed their example. A poor businessman, he was forced to dissolve his band several times, but his arrangements played a key role in the success of Benny Goodman in the late 1930s and provided a template for much of the music of the swing era.

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known as Bull Halsey

(born Oct. 30, 1882, Elizabeth, N.J., U.S.—died Aug. 16, 1959, Fishers Island, N.Y.) U.S. admiral. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy, he commanded a destroyer in World War I. He became a naval aviator in 1935, and in 1940 he was promoted to vice admiral. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, his fleet was at sea; the only U.S. naval presence in the Pacific for months, it carried out surprise attacks against Japanese-held islands in the Marshall and Gilbert islands. A leading exponent of carrier-based aircraft, he became famous for his daring and imaginative tactics. As commander of the South Pacific naval forces, he was instrumental in the Japanese defeat at Guadalcanal. In 1944 he became commander of the 3rd Fleet, leading his carrier task force in brilliant air strikes. He was responsible for finding and destroying the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. He was promoted to fleet admiral in 1945 and retired in 1947.

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orig. George Kenneth Griffey, Jr.

(born Nov. 21, 1969, Donora, Pa., U.S.) U.S. baseball player. Griffey began his professional career in 1987. As a left-handed centre fielder for the Seattle Mariners from 1989, he averaged .300 or better in hitting in seven of his first nine seasons and hit 40 or more home runs in four of those seasons, reaching 56 in 1997 and 1998. His father, Ken Griffey, Sr. (b. April 10, 1950, Donora), was also an outstanding professional baseball player.

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(born Dec. 6, 1921, Waukegan, Ill., U.S.—died Dec. 17, 2003, Sarasota, Fla.) U.S. gridiron football player and coach. He was a star tailback at Northwestern University, but he is best remembered as quarterback of the Cleveland Browns during a 10-year period (1946–55) in which they won 105 games, lost 17, and tied 5 in regular season play and won 7 of 10 championship games. Graham's career average yardage per pass (8.63) was still an NFL record at the beginning of the 21st century. His coaching career was mainly with the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (1959–66) and the Washington Redskins (1966–68). He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1965.

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in full Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

(born March 31, 1948, Washington, D.C., U.S.) U.S. politician. He was the son of Albert Gore, who served in the U.S. Senate from Tennessee. After graduating from Harvard University, he briefly attended divinity school before serving in the Vietnam War as a military reporter (1969–71). He worked as a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville (1971–76) while attending first divinity school and then law school at Vanderbilt University. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1977–85) and later the Senate (1985–93). A moderate Democrat, he was Bill Clinton's vice presidential running mate in 1992 and served two terms (1993–2001) as vice president under Clinton. As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000, he won over 500,000 more popular votes than Republican George W. Bush but narrowly lost the electoral vote (271–266). Gore subsequently devoted much of his time to environmental issues, and his 2006 film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award for best documentary. For his environmental work, he received, with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. In 2007 he also earned an Emmy Award for creative achievement in interactive television for Current TV, a user-generated-content channel he cofounded in 2005.

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(born , July 18, 1921, Cambridge, Ohio, U.S.) U.S. astronaut and senator. He flew 59 missions as a Marine Corps pilot in World War II and 90 during the Korean War. The oldest of the seven astronauts selected in 1959 for the Mercury project's spaceflight training, he was a backup pilot for Alan B. Shepard and Virgil I. Grissom (1926–67), who made the first two U.S. suborbital flights into space. Glenn was selected for the orbital flight, and in February 1962 his space capsule, Friendship 7, was launched and made three orbits. He retired from the space program in 1964 and pursued his interest in politics, serving as U.S. Senator from Ohio (1975–99). In 1998, at age 77, he made his second spaceflight (as part of the crew of the space shuttle Discovery), becoming the oldest person to go into space.

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(born Sept. 16, 1950, Keyser, W.Va., U.S.) U.S. critic and scholar. Gates attended Yale University and the University of Cambridge. He has chaired Harvard University's department of Afro-American Studies for many years. In such works as Figures in Black (1987) and The Signifying Monkey (1988) he has used the term signifyin' to represent a practice that can link African and African American literary histories; his other books include Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1998). He has edited many anthologies, including Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990) and the Norton Anthology of African American Writers (1997), and has restored and edited many lost works by black writers. He writes frequently to a general public, notably in The New Yorker, and he wrote the television series Wonders of the African World (1999).

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(born Jan. 16, 1935, Houston, Texas, U.S.) U.S. automobile racing driver. He became the first four-time winner of the Indianapolis 500 (1961, 1964, 1967, 1977) and is the only driver to have won the Indy 500, the Daytona 500, and the Le Mans Grand Prix. He was national champion stock-car driver in 1968, 1978, and 1979, and he also amassed numerous wins in sports- and midget-car racing.

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(born Nov. 5, 1901, Colorado, Texas, U.S.—died Nov. 14, 1972, Lufkin, Texas) U.S. politician. He received a law degree from National University in Washington, D.C. in 1920. After practicing law in Texas, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (1931–45, 1953–59). Though originally a supporter of the New Deal, by 1937 he had turned against it. In 1938 he was named chairman of the newly created House Un-American Activities Committee; popularly known as the Dies Committee, it pursued alleged communist subversives in New Deal agencies and labour unions. Wheareas conservatives applauded the exposure of supposedly disloyal government and union officials, liberals accused Dies of smearing reputations with unproved charges.

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(born Dec. 18, 1912, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died July 4, 2002, Washington, D.C.) U.S. pilot and administrator, the first African American general in the U.S. Air Force. He graduated from West Point and in 1941 was admitted to the Army Air Corps. He organized the 99th Fighter Squadron, the first all-black air unit, and in 1943 he organized and commanded the Tuskegee Airmen. He flew 60 combat missions. In 1948 Davis helped plan the desegregation of the Air Force, and he later commanded a fighter wing in the Korean War. After retiring as lieutenant general in 1970, he was named director of civil aviation security in the U.S. Department of Transportation (1971–75). In 1998 he was awarded his fourth general's star, attaining the highest order in the U.S. military.

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(born Nov. 4, 1916, St. Joseph, Mo., U.S.) U.S. journalist and television newscaster. He began his career as a reporter with the Houston Post and later worked for United Press (1939–48) and served as a war correspondent in Europe (1942–45). He joined CBS in 1950 as a news reporter and became managing editor and anchor of the widely watched CBS Evening News (1962–81). He hosted numerous documentaries and special reports, notably on the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy and the 1969 Moon landing. His reassuring, avuncular manner made him one of the most trusted figures in U.S. broadcasting.

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orig. Cassius (Marcellus) Clay

(born Jan. 17, 1942, Louisville, Ken., U.S.) U.S. boxer. Cassius Clay took up boxing at the age of 12 and rose through the amateur ranks to win the Olympic light heavyweight crown in 1960. His first professional heavyweight h1 win was against Sonny Liston in 1964. After defending the h1 nine times between 1965 and 1967, he was stripped of it for refusing induction into the armed forces following his acceptance of the teachings of the Nation of Islam. It was then that he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. In 1974 Ali regained his h1 after defeating the former champion Joe Frazier and the then-current champion George Foreman. He lost to Leon Spinks in 1978 but later that year regained the h1 a third time, becoming the first heavyweight champion ever to do so. He retired in 1979, having lost only three of 59 fights. Attempted comebacks in 1980 and 1981 failed. Throughout his career Ali was known for his aggressive charm, invincible attitude, and colourful boasts, often expressed in doggerel verse. “I am the greatest” was his personal credo. Ali's later years have been marked by physical decline. Damage to his brain, caused by blows to the head, has resulted in slurred speech, slowed movement, and other symptoms of Parkinson disease.

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(born Nov. 24, 1925, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 27, 2008, Stamford, Conn.) U.S. writer and editor. He attended Yale University, where he was chairman of the Yale Daily News. In 1955 he founded the National Review; as editor in chief, he used the journal as a forum for his conservative views. His column “On the Right” was syndicated in 1962 and eventually appeared in more than 200 newspapers. From 1966 to 1999 he hosted Firing Line, a weekly television interview program in which he often employed his wit and debating skills against ideological opponents. His books include God and Man at Yale (1951), Rumbles Left and Right (1963), and a series of spy novels.

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(born April 25, 1906, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died July 24, 1997, Arlington, Va.) U.S. jurist. He studied under Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School, receiving his degree in 1931. He practiced labour law in New Jersey until 1949, when he was appointed to the state Superior Court. He rose through the ranks of the New Jersey courts, where he was noted for his administrative skill. Although a Democrat, he was named to the Supreme Court of the United States by Republican Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. He came to be regarded as one of the most influential jurists in its history. A liberal constructionist and an articulate defender of the Bill of Rights, he is perhaps best remembered for his role in a series of obscenity cases, beginning with Roth v. United States (1957), many of which broadened the protection accorded to publishers while seeking to balance individual freedoms with the interests of the community. In New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), he wrote that even false statements about public officials are protected under the 1st and 14th Amendments unless “actual malice” can be demonstrated. He also wrote the majority opinion in Baker v. Carr (1962). He opposed capital punishment and supported abortion rights, affirmative action, and school desegregation. He served until 1990; his decisions numbered more than 1,350.

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(born July 10, 1943, Richmond, Va., U.S.—died Feb. 6, 1993, New York, N.Y.) U.S. tennis player. He won his first grand-slam singles h1 (the 1968 U.S. Open) as an amateur. The first African American member of the U.S. Davis Cup team, he helped win five championships (1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1978). In 1975 he won the Wimbledon singles h1 and received World Championship Tennis top ranking. He retired in 1980 and became captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team (to 1985). Off the court he was a critic of racial injustice, including South Africa's apartheid policy. In 1992 he revealed that he had been infected with HIV by a transfusion following surgery, and he thereafter devoted time to increasing public awareness of AIDS. The U.S. Open is now played at Arthur Ashe Stadium, which opened at the National Tennis Center in Flushing, N.Y., in 1997.

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Alito, Samuel A., Jr.

(born Jan. 13, 1832, Chelsea, Mass., U.S.—died July 18, 1899, Natick, Mass.) U.S. writer. The son of a Unitarian minister, Alger graduated from Harvard with honours and then earned a degree from its divinity school. Forced to leave his pulpit after two years because of allegations of improper activities with youths, he took up writing. Beginning with Ragged Dick (1868), he wrote more than 100 books that were almost alike in preaching that through honesty, cheerful perseverance, and hard work a poor but virtuous lad would have his just reward (though it was almost always precipitated by good luck). His books sold more than 20 million copies, despite consistently weak plots and dialogue, and Alger was one of the most popular and socially influential writers of the late 19th century.

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known as Buzz Aldrin

(born Jan. 20, 1930, Montclair, N.J., U.S.) U.S. astronaut. He graduated from West Point and flew 66 combat missions in the Korean War. In 1963 he received a Ph.D. from MIT and was chosen as an astronaut. In 1966 he joined James A. Lovell, Jr. (b. 1928) on the four-day Gemini 12 flight. Aldrin's 512-hour walk in space proved that humans can function effectively in the vacuum and weightlessness of space. In July 1969, on the Apollo 11 mission, he became the second human to walk on the Moon.

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(born Jan. 5, 1931, Rogers, Texas, U.S.—died Dec. 1, 1989, New York, N.Y.) U.S. dancer and choreographer. In 1942 he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied dance and choreography (1949–54). He then moved to New York, where he performed in various theatrical productions. In 1958 he founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, composed primarily of blacks. The numerous works he choreographed for the company included its signature Revelations (1960), set to black spirituals. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the company toured worldwide, and Ailey became one of the best-known U.S. choreographers.

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JR may stand for:

• Jackie Robinson
• Japan Railways Group or its member companies
• Hokkaido Railway Company or JR Hokkaido
• East Japan Railway Company or JR East
• Central Japan Railway Company or JR Central
• West Japan Railway Company or JR West
• Shikoku Railway Company or JR Shikoku
• Kyushu Railway Company or JR Kyushu
• Japan Freight Railway Company or JR Freight
• Aero California, International Air Transport Association code
• The novel J R, written by William Gaddis
• John Ross "J.R." Ewing, Jr., a television character from Dallas
• Who shot J.R.?, a famous cliffhanger episode of Dallas
• Japan Remote Control, radio control equipment manufacturer
• Jim Rome, a controversial radio host
• Jim Ross, Professional wrestling commentator
• Junius Richard Jayewardene, First Executive President of Sri Lanka
• Johnny Cash, singer
• Johnny Rebel (singer), Southern country singer
• Johnny Rebel, slang term for soldiers of the Confederated States of America
• John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford
• Jeremy Roenick, professional ice hockey player
• J. R. Rotem, hip-hop and pop music producer.
• J. R. Writer, an American hip hop musician.
• Jordan Rudess, the keyboardist of Dream Theater
• J.R., CMR singer and half of production duo So Hot Productions.
• J.R. Redmond, a former NFL player for the New England Patriots.
• J.R. Richard, a former baseball player for the Houston Astros.
• J.R, hip-hop and pop singer
• Jackie Robinson, athlete
• Jupiter Rising a musical band
• John Redcorn a character from King of the Hill

Jr. is the abbreviation for Junior.